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I have been interested in building PCs, and getting more performance from PC hardware since I started properly building and modifying them in the days of the 286. I had the old Sinclair ZX Spectrum back in the early 80's, and I suppose it was that first PC that ignited my interest in Information Technology. (Indeed, the ZX was one of the first 'personal computers' seen in the UK, and credited by some as the starting block of the consumer computer market in this country)
Going from present to past here, a few changes since the first pic. Server and the gateway are now to the right of the screens, the Lian-li is to the Left. Centre screen is a 24” HD widescreen with a 19” on each side.
The Right hand screen is connected to the server, used mainly for media distribution and IRC. It has a separate mouse (well, trackball) and keyboard, so I can converse and shoot people simultaneously. (its on a KVM switch, so it can also act as a screen/interface for my gateway and webserver).
Centre screen is my 'main' monitor. Gaming, surfing, writing this website, anything that currently has my attention.
The Left screen tends to be media and monitoring. A film, news24, maybe the TS client and some detail of hardware status.
My current hardware lineup looks a little like this:
Primary Desktop/Gaming PC
Intel Q6600 quad core running @ 9*385 (love the G0 stepping).
Asus Striker II Extreme (nForce 780i chipset)
4 x 2048 Corsair TwinX
1792MB Asus GTX 295, PCI-E 2.0
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Fatality edition/Logitech 5.1
2 x 150 Gig Western Digital Raptors for system (raid0), 2 x 700 Gig Caviars for storage
Lian-Li PC V2000 case
Water Cooling by Danger Den, Swiftech and Themochill, Air Cooling by Zalman
Dual boot, Debian / Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
Server (or secondary desktop/server I guess)
Dual Intel Xeon 3.2 Nocona core (200*16)
Intel E7525
4 x 4096 Generic ECC Registered DDR2
Highpoint Rocket SATA II RAID controller card 3.5 Terrabytes in Raid5 + 60GB System drive
Chenboro SR107 Server case
Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid' (Debian 5 'Lenny', OpenSolaris and Slackware running as virtual machines).
Gateway
Intel Celeron 1.4 GHz
512 meg PC166 ram
40 gig HD
Smoothwall Express 3 SP1 "Polar" + updates
The case on this one, an old Compaq Evo (as are most of the contents), was modded slightly, with the addition of two fans in the side and one in the top to aid airflow, already quiet 80mm fans running at 7 volts, so still as close to silent as I can get it. Another easy and interesting modification is to piggyback some extra LED's from the ones on the NIC's and drill them into the front of the case (I chose a spare 5.25” bay cover). This shows me network traffic on the inbound and outbound subnets at a glance.
Mobile Computing
Acer Aspire ONE
Intel Atom 330 1.6 GHz dual core
512 meg ram
8 gig + 16 gig Solid State drives, (with 160 gig USB2 External)
Came with an Acer version of Linpus Linux Lite, which was horrid really. Functional for the very very basics. First task, with it not even an hour old was to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. This has since been replaced with eeebuntu3.0 (based on Jaunty). Seems quick and stable, everything works that should.
Historic Projects
I have lost a lot of pictures from early in my modding life, if they turn up on a CD somewhere I'll get them up here.
Like all things I suppose, I started small. The first box I opened was a Compaq Deskpro i386, for a RAM upgrade, (to get Wolfenstein 3D running faster probably). It was always my interest in PC gaming that drove me to make things go faster. Certainly by the time the 486DX came out, I wasn't stopping at ram and GFX card upgrades.
On the 486, overclocking was carried out by means of changing jumpers on the motherboard, and my first attempts enabled me to get the DX66 running stable at a huge 90 something MHz, as long as the case was open, it overheated and crashed at the sight of a side panel. That's when it was decided that if I was going to carry on with overclocking, some consideration of improving stock cooling was going to have to happen. That opened the way for various additional fans to be added, and upgrades and modifications to stock heatsinks.
The next step was the biggie, when AMD released the Socket A processors, specifically the Thunderbird, they reacted well to overclocking but got warm fast. By the time I got my hands on a Thoroughbred I knew air cooling wasn't going to hack it. After some research it seemed water cooling was the way to go, and my first system was a lashup of bits of hosepipe, home made copper blocks, a pond pump and an old oil cooler as a rad. It was a mess, and it leaked (though never on anything important). The Thoroughbred was a great core that reacted well to clocking with good cooling.
My next effort, (wrapped around a 3200+ Barton core), was the first go at using 1/2” diameter tubing, loop included CPU, GPU and Northbridge. By this time water cooling, while still not 'popular', was definitely catching on. (this is also the start of photographic history at the moment)
the Thermaltake Xaviour case performed well through several upgrades and mods. Eventually though I met the problem that all watercoolers do from time to time, I ran out of space.
The stage was set for the AntiSFF Project. Still the most involved PC Project I have worked on, and as such it gets a separate page.
The UFO was such a great case, I didn't change it for years, but in the end I just needed a bit of desk back. I decided to go for a little more subtly on the next case, but still needed room for plenty of HDD's and water cooling. Lots of searching led me to a company called Lian-Li, and I have to say I do not regret getting the Lian-Li case, the build quality and thought throughout the case are second to none. First tests with air cooling were good, but water cooling becomes a habit after a while.
This basically brings the historic to the current, as the LL is still in service.
I'll bung in some random pics here, with an effort to slot them into the time-line.
Think this is what became my Gateway.
Ballistix Tracer RAM, with a DangerDen RBX CPU block just in view.
Re-gassed Prommie Mach II, used for the odd benching session (showing -68 Degrees Centigrade under no load).
Fitting Thermochill PA160.1 into the LL.
Building a Fan Controller for the Server, uses the small voltage drop across a diode to its advantage, basically just switch in more and more diodes for less volts/slower fans.
